RE: Let’s Divide Law-Enforcement: Natural Law vs. Positive Law
"...delegates/representatives, then, have an imperative mandate: they can only vote in accord with consensus pre-determined by their constituents."
Well, what would even be the point of such then? Delegates and representatives are presently little more than chokepoints where power can be seized from constituents en masse.
Direct democracy, liquid democracy, would be far less prone to corruption. Delegates, were they able to be proxied, and the proxies withdrawn at will, might be capable of forced integrity, but only insofar as proxies could be withdrawn at will.
As to Anarchy, if there are no rulers, how can there be rules? While it's an epistemelogical and pedantic ruse, and as you point out, in effect there isn't practical difference between Anarchic and Autarchic systems, I just reckon the latter is a more accurate description - and hasn't been saddled with the connotation with chaos Anarchy has.
Delegative democracy or some form of representation was historically (and somewhat still) necessary because we have never perfected any process of direct democracy that is scalable. With the perfection of digital voting and encryption, maybe we will in the near future. Direct democracy was always the anarchist goal, but delegative democracy was necessary in order to get it to work on any large scale.
As for rules vs. rulers... If you perfect democracy and achieve a consensus-based system, then everyone is a ruler. But if everyone is a ruler, no one is a ruler—no one is ruled over by anyone else, autonomy reigns. There's a certain failure of language here that causes the dialectic to swirl and collapse in on itself as the distinctions lose their distinctness. It's kind of like the question of public ownership vs. private ownership in a Georgist (land value tax) framework. Do Georgists advocate private property or communal ownership? The answer is yes! The distinction starts to break down.
Everyone rules themselves. They are autarchs.
Plus, I like the word. Reminds me of Aurochs, admirable beasts =p